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Next Practices: The InterSim Strategy

A Prescription for the Soul – Peter’s New Novel About Boomers & the American Dream

The Recruiting Resources You Deserve

What’s Happening in the Job Market … That Could Happen to You.

Next Practices: The InterSim Strategy

Most organizations view the interviewing process as an exercise in assessment. It’s the employer’s opportunity to probe a person’s skills, experience and fit with the organization. They also know that this face-to-face interaction is probably the best shot they’ll have at selling a high caliber applicant on working for the organization. But what’s the best way to do that?

It’s common practice these days for an interview to be a two-way evaluation: the employer questions the candidate and the candidate – especially if they are an “A” or “B” level performer – questions the employer. Both are looking to answer a simple, yet profound question: will the job under discussion fully tap the individual’s talent and motivate them to continue their excellence at work?

Most employers believe that question can only be answered with a business-like investigation, often accompanied by skill testing, all designed to tease out precisely what the candidate can do and has done at work and how well they could do or have done it. Candidates, on the other hand, seek to answer the question through observation of the investigation process as well as every prospective coworker they meet, all to determine what it will be like to be an employee of the organization

The key to success in both cases is clarity and accuracy of perception. To achieve it, a national campaign has emerged to improve what happens to candidates during the recruiting process. Such an initiative is important for many reasons, but one in particular has a huge impact on the quality of talent an organization recruits. The best talent act like good consumers when shopping for a new employer. They want to “test drive” the organization before they commit to buying its offer of employment.

Now obviously, candidates can’t actually take the employment experience out for a spin so they create a surrogate, instead. They focus on what happens to them from the moment they are contacted about an interview until they walk out the door after it’s been conducted. They believe that the way they are treated as a candidate is a good approximation of the way they will be treated as an employee.

Simple courtesy and treating candidates respectfully are important, of course, but they are not sufficient to tip the scale for top talent. They expect more from their candidate experience – they want to feel what it’s like to be employed in the organization. That’s what the InterSim strategy does; it uses your interview process to simulate the experience they can expect at work.

Give Them a Feel for the Work Experience

Top talent are happy to be given information about the culture and values of a prospective employer, but just as they wouldn’t commit to buying a car based on a dealer’s brochures, they’re unlikely to commit to accepting an employer’s offer without some additional experiential insight.

That insight can be provided in either or both of two ways:

Task Simulation: Embed one or more tasks in the interview process that realistically mimic the work experience. For example, Starbucks promotes collegiality – its employment brand declares “we call each other partners” – as the core of its employment experience. To make that statement come to life during the interview process, it has candidates for select positions participate in a coffee bean taste testing exercise with their prospective boss. The experience is meant to simulate the collegiality inherent in working together toward a common outcome – in this case, determining the best tasting bean.

Day Simulation: Embed a panel of three-to-five peers in the interview process, who do the same or similar work as that called for by the opening to which the candidate has applied. The purpose of the panel is not assessment, but rather to describe their day-to-day work in detail and to answer questions about the practices, procedures, and interactions involved. This is a peer-to-peer interaction, so the session should be conducted without supervisors or managers in the room, not to prevent them from interfering with the dialogue, but to avoid the candidates’ perception that they could or would.

InterSim dramatically improves the quality of a candidate’s experience which both helps the employer sell the best talent on their employment opportunity and the candidate make an informed decision about their prospects for success with the employer. Despite those advantages, however, InterSim is probably best used only for select positions, as it clearly requires more time and greater effort than that currently devoted to most traditional interview processes. That said, as much as possible, the basic strategy of giving candidates a clear picture of what it’s like to work for an employer should shape every interaction and communication with them.

Thanks for reading,

Peter

Visit me at Weddles.com

Next Practices – The Book

Best Practices are so yesterday! They are sourcing and recruiting techniques designed for a time that has passed.

Next Practices are strategies and tactics for winning the real War for the Best Talent – the one you actually face today and will face tomorrow. They modernize your approach to:

Recruitment Advertising

Social Recruiting

Candidate Engagement

Optimizing the Candidate Experience

Managing Your Own Recruiting Career

so you maximize your success.

The book is composed of short, straight-to-the-point essays that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes and still transport you to a whole new dimension in the state-of-the art for recruiting and sourcing talent. With titles like Become a Talent Whisperer, Post-Social Recruiting, The Inconvenient Truth of Recruiting and Don’t Post a Job, Advertise Respect, they are sure to entertain and enlighten you.

So, don’t recruit with yesterday’s techniques. Get Next Practices and start recruiting right now with the next generation of recruiting mastery.

A Prescription for the Soul

One is a coming-of-age tale about a group of American teenagers – Army brats – living on a small U.S. Army garrison in Verona, Italy in 1963. They spend their weekends exploring the ancient city of Venice … and themselves … as they try to understand the social and political upheaval taking place back home. And then without warning, they are thrust into a crisis that will shape their lives and their view of the American Dream.

The other is a coming-of-wisdom tale about those same teenagers – now aging Baby Boomers – living on the Gold Coast of Connecticut in 2007. They spend their days exulting in their exclusive class … the 1-percenters of 21st Century America … even as they confront the despair inflicted on others by their own corruption and greed. Then once again, they find themselves facing a crisis, but this one will shape the lives of their children and the legacy of their generation.

A timeless saga of growth and redemption and an unwavering examination of the challenges facing America today.

This historical novel is not yet in bookstores, but you can read a free excerpt and order a pre-publication copy of the book atOneStoryforAll.com.

The Recruiting Resources You Deserve

The best recruiters use the best resources to get the job done. And, when it comes to reaching top talent online, their choice is clear. It’s WEDDLE’s Books. Get yours today!

Finding Needles in a Haystack. This one-of-a-kind guide lists over 25,000 keywords and keyword phrases, across 5,400 job and position titles in 28 industries and professions.

What’s Happening In the Job Market?

Despite all the happy talk about the growth in job openings, it’s still incredibly hard to find a GOOD job and one that pays anywhere near what it costs to live in this country. That’s as true for recruiters as it is for everyone else in the workforce.

So, what’s going on?

There are plenty of talking heads opining on cable and more than enough blog posts and magazines offering their take on the situation. But, wouldn’t it be nice to look into this situation and its causes without having to endure a lot of self-appointed punditry?

Well, now you can. Read Peter Weddle’s novel about the 21st Century world of work in America called A Multitude of Hope. It uses the fictional tale of three job seekers to explore what’s happening to individual working men and women in a workplace and job market churning with change.